I subscribe to Bill St. Arnaud‘s CA*net 4 News mailing list (he’s got a blog too). Bill works at CANARIE Inc. which operates CA*net, the world’s first national optical Internet research and education network (est. 1998 ) in Canada. At first I subscribed to learn more about different models of fiber ownership, specifically home-owned fiber, although now there seems to be a shift in his interested more towards SOA, cloud computing and zero-carbon IT services. Which is also interesting of course. From a look at his blogger profile he has a host of other interests, like in e-democracy.

Bugs in large distributed systems (author’s note: anyone working with grids knows how true this is)

Scaling quickly

Reputation fate sharing

Software licensing

As Bill says in his posting, reliability is a problem for zero or low carbon emission cloud services, since cloud computing must be geographical distributed to be reliable, but you can’t find low-emission-and-cost energy everywhere.

Here are some some figures about energy production cost that Bill cites from the paper:

Price of kilowatt-hours of electricity by region

Price per KWH

Source

Possible reasons why

3.6¢

Idaho Hydroelectric power

not sent long distance

10.0¢

California Electricity

transmitted long distance over the grid;
limited transmission lines in Bay Area; no coal
fired electricity allowed in California.